Our first Occasional Supplement has arrived! It’s for The Weathering Report #1, and contains the results of an exercise in measuring ‘the weather of one’s stride’, as well as extracts from Merleau-Ponty and CA Conrad, who were in the air at that time.

It’s a classic A6 8-page folded zine. We printed 30 of them at The Rizzeria riso co-op in Sydney, in a rather fetching grey ink, and still have a few left. If you’d like to get one, leave a comment below and we’ll tell you how.

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONSCool and cloudy early-summer day, with intermittent light rain and light winds. Jennifer Hamilton (1/5th of Weathering) took her NYU Sydney “Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory: Ecocriticism” students to the beach. We gathered barefoot, put our toes in the water and considered what they’ve learned in the semester. The water was warmer than the air. The waves were big and stormy.

FORECASTHow can we translate theoretical learning and the reading of fiction into conventional professions such as journalism, NGO service and policy making?

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITYChoose an envelope. Engage in considering your body and weather. Standing sitting raising arms up, reflect. How is the weather different in different postures? How can you feel the weather and the world in your breath? Images from this activity are included below.

We also played the Game of Global Futures as a way of escaping the rain.

SATELLITE IMAGES

WARNINGS CURRENTOverheard:

“When I breathe I feel cleansed, as though the dirtiness of my body gets exhaled”

“When I breathe I feel like the dirt is coming inward”

“Let us go to a cafe and have pizza and tea and shelter from the rain and play the Game of Global Futures”

“I love the feeling of just coming out of the sea – what is it, that buoyancy you feel.”WEATHER MAPSOcean weather = the wave as a relay of distant weathers; the wave here is an index of weathers not here (in part). The water and waves visiblize and sonify the weather. Waves as memories of Other Weathers.

LIVE READINGSMarq DeVilliers, Windswept (2006). In particular, we note that the last category on the Fujita Tornado Scale reads as follows:

“Fujita 6, inconceivable tornado: Sustained windes of 319 to 379 mph, but no one will ever know, because all measuring devices would be destroyed, along with pretty well everything else.”

Also from DeVilliers: a “weather bomb” : “an explosive pressure change defined as a drop of 24 millibars in twenty-four hours with a central pressure below 1000 millibars” (156) as in:

“The combination was enough to turn the new system – Ivan Redux – into a weather bomb, which as we have seen is a slightly hysterical though still technically rigorous term, defined as a system that is already at less than 1000 millibars when it drops a further 24 millibars in twenty-four hours” (284) .

Getting ready for our contribution to Chart Collective, Tessa and Jen spent Wednesday afternoon discussing how to represent our collective microclimates on a “map” given 2/3rds of the collective were not in the same general location.

The questions of the discussion:

How to represent weather that is not connected to place?

How to represent a collaboration that is geographically unevenly spaced?

What is the thing that links us?

How to move from the epochal anthropocenic scale of climate change to the mundane, everyday personal microclimate?

Images of Weather Maps:

Climate graphs represent time and are terrible ways of representing the lived experience of climate: https://theconversation.com/februarys-global-temperature-spike-is-a-wake-up-call-56341

Old weather maps are pretty: https://www.kshs.org/cool3/graphics/weathermap1884.jpg / https://hvfarmscape.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/slide35.jpg (this map was drawn one week before Tessa’s grandmother left Germany).

William Dawes’ first map of Sydney – a very incomplete grasp of place. Potentially analogous to our grasp of climate http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/image/4204572-3×2-700×467.jpg (possibly analogous to a weather map without place)

Google offers no help on the question “how to represent time?” – https://www.google.com.au/search?q=how+to+represent+time&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjcxY2lkpPOAhXIjZQKHcxhAvYQ_AUICCgB

We thought that the topographical layer of the standard weather map is limiting our imaginations and that climate and time

– PERSONAL MICROCLIMATE AS CITIZEN SCIENCE VERSION OF CLIMATE CHANGE The only way we get a sense of the average is through personal observation of trends

– REDUNDANT MICROCLIMATES OF OLD BUILDINGS / THE MICROCLIMATES OF INCOMPLETE RENOVATIONS – how the build environment and the ideologies of private property, stages of technological development and personal need intersect to produce microclimates

– THE WEATHERING MAP is more about climate than weather, old weather maps, however, provide a pool of resources for visualisation. Place does not unite us. We are united in our living present in this this moment of epochal time.

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
In both the dominant environmental imaginary and empirical scientific study, climate change is too often posited as distant and abstracted from our everyday experiences of weather. Either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past buttress such abstraction. Both largely obfuscate the ways that our bodies weather the world and are part of the changing climate.

FORECAST
Working together in a new collaborative configuration, we propose the concept and practice of weathering as a “poethical” interruption to these abstractions — as a way to radically localise, or embody, the global phenomenon of climate change. Over the coming months/years, we look forward to exploring, devising and sharing different approaches to meteorology as a multispecies endeavour, paying particular attention to the temporalities and instrumentalities of weather as it is encountered and understood by different bodies.

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY
After some months of percolation, our first meeting took place on a hot late-January afternoon. Hosted by Astrida in Marrickville, we spent a few happy hours in a shady nook of the Cook’s River, sharing texts, exercises and possibilities. On the agenda were turning verbs into action, scientific poetry and problems that are uninhabitable. Jen led a short exercise in list-making (‘When weather annoys me’), and Stephanie brought along a makeshift wind-drawing device constructed from a bucket, some string and a pencil.

Here are Bec’s notes:

“Your teeth and how to keep them”;

Transcorporeal bodies;

Torquing;

Exodeviance;

Language adequate to experience;

Beaufort wind scale;

Naturalising the boiling point of water—a fiction on which celsius is founded;